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31 Days of NaNoWriMo Prep: Day 7 – Looking Back at the First Week of Preptober

Yeah, in case any of you guys weren’t aware, this month is actually called “Preptober” by those in the NaNoWriMo community. I technically could’ve called this series “31 Days of Preptober”, but… Eh, it doesn’t have the same ring to it. So, welcome to Day 7 of “31 Days of NaNoWriMo Prep”! This post is going to be different from the others I’ve done so far in this series because today isn’t about teaching you something new about writing, but, instead, catching you up on where I am in the prepping process!

So, this week was unexpectedly busy. First of all, on the day before “31 Days” started, I got the opportunity to see FREAKING HAMILTON. You know, that musical about the ten dollar founding father without a father? Yeah, I won the lottery and got to sit in the second row, basically center stage. It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, hands down.

Unfortunately, it also set me back a bit on writing these blog posts and filming/editing the corresponding videos, so I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. This means that I haven’t done nearly as much prepping as I would’ve liked. I really, really wanted to jump right into outlining book two of my series The Caspian Chronicles on October 1st, but I had homework and things to do, so I wasn’t able to work on prepping at all that day. As for the rest of this week, I couldn’t ever find the time to sit down for a few hours and outline, so, instead, I worked on planning out some of the new characters that’re going to be showing up in this book. Remember the post I made about character creation? Yeah, I did that. I wrote the characters and some of their basic information down, figured out where in the story they’d probably come in, etc. And let me tell you, I’m introducing some great characters in this book (not that it probably matters to you, since you don’t even know the characters I’m introducing in book one, The Forbidden Prophecy, but still).

I definitely know that I’ll have more time in the next few weeks to actually outline, though, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also excited to post the video on outlining, which is coming on Monday, so stay tuned for that. I am happy that, already, this month is getting me excited to start writing come November. That was what I’d been hoping would happen. With the combined stress of putting out blog posts and videos every day, keeping up with homework, having a life, and prepping for NaNoWriMo, I feel positive that once I’ve taken some of the pressure off of myself next month, the words will pour out of my fingers. It’s kind of like the swimmers who don’t shave their legs until a competition, so that they get used to practicing with resistance and then absolutely fly once that resistance is gone. You know what I’m saying? That was kind of a weird metaphor, but I had a lot of friends that were on the swim team in high school.

Anyway, I’m curious. Where are you all in your Preptober journey? Have you done more than me, or less? If you’ve done more, congratulations! If you’ve done less, don’t worry about it. You’ve got three more weeks to absolutely blow me out of the water. I have the utmost confidence in you.

I wish I had more to talk about today, but maybe a shorter post will be a welcome relief to you after all of this information I’ve been spitting at you for the past six days. Of course, if you’d like to hear me ramble a bit more, you could always check out the corresponding YouTube video here. It’s different from the others in this series because I didn’t use this blog as a script, but rather formatted it like my regular writing vlogs that I do every Saturday. That being said, make sure you come back tomorrow, because we’ll be learning about World Building for Day 8 of “31 Days of NaNoWriMo Prep”, and who doesn’t love world building?